Flagrant Conduct

"A highly informative, detailed, even thrilling account of how the Supreme Court arguments reshaped American law."—Michael Bronkski, San Francisco ChronicleNo one could have predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal offense would reverberate in American constitutional law, exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and challenging the traditional conception of what makes a family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff's deputies entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun. Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence's bedroom.
So begins Dale Carpenter's "gripping and brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work nine years in the making...